Thin Green Line

In April 2009, The Australian published an article claiming an ice age is imminent, based on the observation that sunspots were few and far between. The article also contains a completely bogus claim that temperatures dropped 0.7°C in 2007. While the temperature drop claim was pure fabrication (or to be charitable, misreading of a data source), the drop in sunspot count is not, and sunspot numbers correlate very well with solar output. We have just emerged from the deepest solar minimum in nearly 100 years so while the ice age story is obviously ridiculous, we should have had near-record lows the last few years instead of temperatures staying close to record highs.

If this is an ice age, where’s the ice going?

More to the point, a project called GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment), which uses satellites to do accurate measurements of changes in mass on the ground, shows changes in the major land-based ice sheets are pointing in the wrong direction. Mass loss is accelerating [Velicogna 2009], hardly indicative of a slide into an ice age:

The graphs show the monthly change in ice mass. Don’t get too excited by the uptick in the last Greenland months; that reflects moving into northern winter. January 2009 had a significant loss of ice over January 2008. The latest GRACE data has not yet been formally published, but the Skeptical Science site has an update that shows the downward trend continuing into 2010.

What of the Arctic? Some have taken comfort in the fact that Arctic sea ice extent (defined as the fraction of the surface with more than 15% ice) hit an all time low in 2007 and bounced back the next couple of years. The trouble is recent measures of Arctic ice volume [Polar Science 2010] show that even if the area covered with ice hasn’t been shrinking, the volume of the ice has. What’s more, the latest measure of sea ice extent [Artic 2010] has just crossed over the 2007 line (check the latest here):

So if this is an ice age, where’s all the ice going?

The Other Big Issue

Meanwhile the US Gulf oil spill continues almost unabated, more than a month after it started. What this disaster underlines is that more and more often, new oil is going to be found not only in ecologically sensitive situations, but locations where extraction is highly risky. We’ve already seen how hard it is to stop a major leak in the deep ocean. It takes little imagination to see how much harder this would be under Arctic conditions. So drilling for oil in the Arctic has to be considered an extremely high-risk proposition, enthusiasts notwithstanding.

What of alternatives? We’ve known for a long time that oil from coal technology is highly polluting [Chartock et al. 1982], and tar sands are turning out to be even worse [Timoney and Lee 2009].

We are not only facing an end to cheap oil, but we have to face up to the fact that there is no way to replace cheap oil by another fossil fuel without substantial environmental costs. Add to this the fact that these oil substitutes, by virtue of energy-intensive production, contribute much more to CO₂ emissions than conventional oil, and we are facing a very stark choice:

• carry on as if there is no problem and pay an increasingly unacceptable environmental price, or
• make the search for alternatives a top priority.

Where is this taking us?

Exiting from the solar low will almost certainly take us into rapid temperature rise again. We are already seeing an uptick in the first part of 2010 that has no explanation in natural causes. Had we reacted rationally 20 years ago to the earliest indications that harmful climate change was possible by a gradual phased move away from fossil fuels, we would not have a serious problem today.

Consider this analogy. You are contemplating climbing down a steep rocky cliff. You have many years’ experience of climbing, all the best safety gear and have made a thorough study of the rock face, and concluded you have all the risks under control. You want to do your climb under ideal conditions: low wind, good visibility, mild temperatures. I’d say in this situation, go for it. Have a good time and let me know what the view was like on the way down. Now visualise that same cliff. It’s past midnight on a dark night, and a bush fire is raging at your back, rushing toward you at speed, driven by unpredictable gusty winds. You know nothing about rock climbing, have no safety gear and no light. Your only escape from the fire is down the rock face. I wouldn’t give much for your chances.

The failure to deal timeously with the combined issues of climate change and peak oil is putting both the environment and the world economy into the scenario of no option but to dive over a cliff to escape an unavoidable threat. The time to avoid such a scenario is rapidly running out.

Earlier in 2010, the Greens won the balance of power in Tasmania, with an unprecedented vote of over 20%. In the UK election, the Greens won their first seat ever. In Colombia, the Greens candidate for president was at one stage the frontrunner, and has done well enough to go through to a run-off vote.

Collectively, these things amount to a movement. But is it enough? There is a thin green line separating humanity from economic and environmental catastrophe, a catastrophe that is inevitable if we carry on as we are. That’s why the 2010 federal election in Australia is so important: Labor has dropped the ball on climate change, and the Liberals have fallen into abject denial. A big swing to the Greens is the only thing that can pull Australia back on course to dealing with the hard problems – and can send a message to the world that the other green shifts in politics around the world are not a fluke.

Also published at Online Opinion: comments there welcome.

References

[Artic 2010] Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis, NSIDC. Last accessed 29 May 2010.
[Polar Science 2010] Polar Science Center, Applied Physics Lab, University of Washington. Last accessed 29 May 2010.
[Chartock et al. 1982] MA Chartock, MD Devine, MR Cines and SE Plotkin,  Environmental Issues of Liquid Transportation Fuels from Coal, Environmental Conservation, vol. 9 no. 2, pp 131-139, 1982
[Timoney and Lee 2009] Kevin P Timoney and Peter Lee. Does the Alberta Tar Sands Industry Pollute? The Scientific Evidence, The Open Conservation Biology Journal, 2009, 3, 65-81
[Velicogna 2009] I Velicogna. Increasing rates of ice mass loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets revealed by GRACE, Geophys Res Letters, vol. 36, L19503, 4 pp.

The Real Conspiracy

Imagine what you would do if you were an executive in an industry making $100-million a day in profits, and someone came up with some bogus science that threatened your profits. Worse still, this bogus science, if accepted, represented an existential crisis: it would close you down.

What would you do?

Imagine also you are a highly technical industry requiring world-class science to conduct your business and to ensure your future profitability. You therefore have the resources internally to work up an alternative theory or find flaws in the scientific attack on your industry.

What would you do?

Your shareholders would rightly be outraged and demand your scalp at the next stockholder meeting if you did not contest any bogus threat to your continued profitability. If this science is truly bogus, with all your resources, you should easily be able to justify the cost of countering it by doing a definitive study that falsified the bogus theory. So you do your due diligence, and your scientists report back to you.

Let’s now consider two possibilities:

1. the science does turn out to be bogus, or
2. your scientists tell you sorry, the “bogus” science is actually right

In the first case, easy. You publish the results. You publish all the data and computer code, so any scientist can verify independently that you have it right.

Problem solved. The bogus science goes the way of the flogiston theory.

In the second case, what do you do?

Here’s a hint. Is the fossil fuel industry behaving as if the first case applied?

---

Mad scientist image from http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MadScientist
Post-apocalyptic city: http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Speedpaint__Industrial_city_by_I_NetGraFX.jpg 

The warmest year?

Since the whole brouhaha over stolen climate scientists’ emails broke last year, a clear emphasis of the science obfuscation lobby has been trying to con the public into believing the data is all flawed, and there’s nothing to worry about. One of the fall-backs in the attack on the mainstream has been the claim that satellite data hasn’t been showing as strong an increase as the data sets based on surface measurements. While NASA does their measurement independently from the UK Hadley Climactic Research Centre (CRU), the conspiracy-theoretic view is that they are all in it together.

Well, how is the satellite record looking lately? I moseyed over to the AMSU-A temperatures site maintained by Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama at Huntsville (a favourite of the denialosphere for his consistently lower warming trend) and Danny Braswell of NASA and did the following, which you can repeat to update the results:

1. click Draw graph
   
2. click all the checkboxes and click Redraw
   

This is my result:

 The orange line that stops in April is the daily temperatures for this year. Observe that since 10 January, every day has had the highest temperature for that date in the satellite record going back to 1998. This particular data only starts partway through 1998 so we don’t have the complete picture back to the last record or near-record year (depending whose data you look at; some put 2005 slightly higher than 1998) but if this trend continues, 2010 will easily set a new record for satellite temperatures. Is this because we’re in a super-monster El Niño? Not if you look at the SOI (most recent values at time of writing from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology):

The thing to note here is that a negative SOI value puts us in El Niño (higher than average temperatures) while a positive value indicates La Niña (lower than average temperatures). Also, there is a lag of about a year between SOI peaks and global temperature peaks. The El Niño in 2004-2005 with a peak early in 2005 resulted in 2005 being an unusually warm year. Do we see a similar pattern for the last 12 months? No. Although we have been in an El Niño phase since the second half of 2009, that effect has been nowhere near strong enough to account for a new record in temperatures, certainly not as early as January 2010.

Could the SOI be amplified by a rising solar cycle? Sunspot numbers are trending up but we are still pretty close to the solar minimum:

If you’d prefer to look at total solar irradiance (TSI) as measured by satellites, rather than sunspots, go to PMOD, where you’ll see the energy inputs from the sun are not on a steep upwards trend and should be significantly lower than in 2004-2005:

You have to line this data up with SOI to get a good idea of what is causing short term blips in global temperatures: El Niño does not in general coincide with the peak of the solar cycle. At some point this will happen, resulting a really hot year. But leave this aside, since it won’t happen soon. What we have now, early 2010, is a temperature trend tracking above all recorded temperatures since 1998 (or more properly 1999, since we don’t have 1998 temperatures in the first half of the year in the AMSU-A data set) and we can’t pin that effect on El Niño or on the sun.

What next? Is someone already planning to steal Spencer’s emails?

---

Update

I’ve plotted the mean daily temperature anomaly versus 2005 (each day minus the same day in 2005) for the year to 25 April. The trend (linear regression) over this period is 6°C per century – making up for lost time from previous slower warming by satellite measurements? Oh, and the correlation coefficient of 0.79 is highly significant even with this small sample size. Enjoy (or not, if you don’t want warming to be real). For missing data (a small fraction of the total), I took the average of the two nearest days that did have data.

And here's the AMSU-A big picture for 25 April 2010:

and an update on the SOI picture:

SOI is not the whole picture for predicting the effect of ENSO on temperature; a more comprehensive model clearly shows 2010 should be a cooling phase, not a warming phase.

Still lots of time in the year …

---

Yet Another Update

If you go to the site now, it says Channel 4 failed in 2008. That’s what happens in science: a weird result is more likely to be a consequence of instrument failure than anything else. The major data sets do show 2010 as one of the warmer years though not by a significant margin (despite the other data indicating it should have been a cool year, including the solar cycle starting to exit an unusually deep low and a strong La Niña).

What I find particularly odd about all this is this note (dates in US format, so this is in March)

03/06/2008/1200UTC:NOAA-16 AMSU-A channel 4 has gone bad.  As a result, NOAA-16 ATOVS sounding files are no longer being produced by NESDIS, thus they are no longer in the "atovs" dumps in the GDAS and CDAS networks and they (temperature retrievals) are no longer available for assimilation by the CDAS.  The "atovs" dumps now contain only NOAA-15 ATOVS soundings and only these temperature retrievals (cloudy only) are assimilated by the CDAS.  In addition, the failed channel 4 data has resulted in no NOAA-16 AMSU-A data being assimilated by the NAM/NDAS or GFS/GDAS GSI (even though these files are still being produced by NESDIS and NOAA-16 AMSU-A data continue to be dumped in the "1bamua" files in the CDAS, GDAS, GFS, NDAS and NAM networks).

It seems someone knew nearly 2 years before the weird 2010 data went live that there was something wrong with the data. Curiously, we didn’t see wild accusations flung around the blogosphere about this one. I leave it to the reader to explain.

Fool me twice

As the cacophony of voices attacking climate science grows, I have to wonder: where are the journalists? Have they forgotten their job description? In any other field, if such an obvious, misinformed lobby arose, would they rate any attention?

Well, maybe.

During organized tobacco’s war on science, many newspapers reported propaganda created by paid tobacco lobbyists as a legitimate alternative to mainstream science. Other industries took up the same strategy: producers of CFCs who paid ozone hole deniers, and asbestos vendors who refused to acknowledge guilt in killing their own workers in the most horrific way in the cause of making a quick buck. In South Africa, according to a Harvard study, over 300,000 people died unnecessarily because the Mbeki government chose to believe pseudo-science when reality did not suit the president’s politics.

Fit to the Pattern

In all these cases, the tactics were remarkably similar. A small group, mostly with no scientific credentials in the area, supported by an even smaller group with some relevant scientific background, claimed that they represented an alternative viewpoint that had to be aired, and increasingly stridently portrayed the mainstream as dishonest, excluding alternative theories and even a religion. In each case, if you scratched below the surface, the strident accusations had no merit.

Is climate science any different? Not in principle, but in degree. The number of actual paid lobbyists is quite small, and the tactics have been narrow (as ably documented by John Mashey): discredit a small number of key scientists, tarring the rest as in on the plot, and cause general doubt among the public who are unaccustomed to evaluating scientific evidence. From there, rely on the gullibility of journalists and a ready constituency of conspiracy theorists and absolutist free marketeers who abhor any form of government intervention, and then rely on the viral properties of the Internet to spread the message far and wide. All this is a clever refinement on previous business-sponsored anti-science campaigns that didn’t have the Internet as a tool to spread disinformation on the cheap (AIDS denial was the first anti-science campaign I know of that did this, and it went pretty far without the benefit of an industrial sponsor). The biggest difference though is that mishandling climate change has the potential to cause disaster on an unprecedented scale. The ozone hole has made it inconvenient to live in countries like Australia, where sun-lovers court cancer if they don’t apply enough sun screen. Asbestos kills in horrible ways, but the number of victims is limited to those who are directly exposed. Tobacco too kills in horrible ways, if in much larger numbers than asbestos. AIDS is a terrible affliction to treat as a political problem that can be wished away. But climate change is a threat that carries risks for the entire biosphere. Not only that, if we wait too long before switching to an alternative energy economy, the economic effects of a sudden worldwide shift to new forms of energy could be devastating.

The Risks

Clearly, the lowest-risk approach to climate change is gradual emissions reduction, and a slow transition to a new energy economy, a process that has enough benefits to be worth exploring long before we were sure of the science. Had we started this in the late 1980s when the evidence started to become clear, we would be well on the way today towards a clean energy economy. So why the massive resistance? As with CFCs, tobacco, asbestos and HIV, there are political and economic constituencies who are threatened by change.

The big risk to humanity is not just from the dangers in failing to slow climate change and to re-gear economies for low emissions. It is also from discrediting science. Science is not a matter of opinion: a theory stands or falls by how well it fits the evidence, including how well its predictions stand up to measurement. By attempting to turn climate science, and indeed any science that offends a particular special interest, into a matter for debate where the evidence counts for less than personal preference, we risk reverting from a society of reason to a society of superstition. So there are big issues at stake, and the fact that so much of the discourse on this subject has swung away from reason to personal attack, and insisting that the facts bend to opinion rather than that the science be evaluated for what it is, is cause for serious concern.

The Real Failure

Why have they been allowed to get away with it? George Monbiot, in his book Heat, exposed the link between the anti-science of tobacco and climate change (more links in my discussion of his book). It does not take brilliant investigative journalism, following on from that, to realise that the attack on climate science is a massive con designed to buy the fossil fuel industry time, at the expense of the rest of humanity, who stand to pay a huge price if action is taken too late.

This is not the first time this tactic has been used, yet the anti-science movement gets away with it again and again. Tobacco. HIV. Asbestos. CFCs. And now climate science. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me five times, I’m a journalist.

Call to Action

So what can you do? Join my campaign or any other that you feel comfortable supporting to oppose demonizing science. Write letters to the media, making it clear you do not support turning science into a matter of opinion. Sign my pro-science petition, and consider joining my LinkedIn pro-science group to share ideas.